CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CALENDARS AND COUNTING



Tonia Sharlach

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

(L. P. Hartley)

Do not worry about your problems with mathematics: I assure you mine are far

greater.

(A. Einstein)

G

eneral histories of the Ancient Near East often stress the huge treasure-trove of

tablets that survive from Mesopotamia and the economic focus of many cuneiform

archives. It is true that the vast majority of tablets that have been recovered to date from

the third millennium BCare administrative in nature (Figure 15. 1 ). Accounting and

administration being what they are, counting, measuring, and dating are central. The

scribes wrote to record how many workers at what rate of pay, how much of the canal

had been dredged, how many units of barley were harvested, what interest rate a loan

bore, and so on. To convey this information clearly, the Sumerians used unique systems

of counting and calendrics. While they may seem cumbersome to us, studying them can

reveal a world wherein everything had its proper place. This chapter aims to provide an

overview of counting – that is, numbers, metrology, mathematics and its evolution, and

numeracy and scribal education in the third millennium. We will then turn to calendars,

that is, year names and month names, as well as calendrical oddities and reforms.

COUNTING

That one could (or should) write more than a paragraph on counting may surprise and

dismay the reader: the average historian has little affinity for mathematics. Because we

count using a decimal system ( 1 , 10 , 100 , 1000 etc.), and other people, such as the

Greeks and Romans, did too, we may imagine that a decimal system was somehow

universal. Some have even linked this to human anatomy: a guide to ancient mathe-

matics tells us, “As Aristotle had noted long ago, the widespread use today of the deci-

mal system was but the result of the anatomical accident that most of us are born with

ten fingers and ten toes” (Boyer 1991 : 4 ). Indeed, some early scholars saw in cuneiform

records evidence for a decimal system.^1 But the main Sumerian counting system used

sixty as a base. The critical numbers were thus 1 , 10 , 60 , 120 , 360 , 3600 etc.